Software

wireless upgrade

I have been experiencing more wireless weirdness recently. What once was stable and reliable has become increasingly sporadic, unreliable and damned irritating for no obvious reason.

I am not a networking sort of guy. I am not particularly interested in wireless networking. I use WEP in an effort to secure my network and stop my neighbours piggy backing off it but that’s about it.

I am ashamed to admit that, on one occasion, when my wireless network was broken, I briefly piggy backed on an unsecured network just to temporarily solve the problem.

VMware beware

Microsoft announce Virtual Server 2005 is now freely available.

Whatever you can do, we can do (but a bit later).

could do better

Some people might have expected the clock on an expensive Sony digital car radio to automatically switch into British Summer Time.

However, they would be wrong and I will now be forced to try to remember the location of the fine manual.

from zero to hero and back again

I thought this was simply hilarious. Thank goodness, he captured a screenshot for prosperity.

In Shreds

Everything was in its place. Then I went and changed everything (again). My therapist says this is a character defect and a sign of subliminal procrastination.

Hard reset Palm Pilot. Download Thunderbird extension to sync address book. Doesn’t work.

So now my Contacts are in Thunderbird (periodic manual export/import) and I am using the Palm for Calendar and Tasks. If it’s good enough for Dave Allen, then it’s good enough for me.

Next Action: Wait for Thunderbird/Sunbird to fully support Palm synchronisation.

Thunderbirds are go !

My old company used Exchange Server. I used to use Outlook for mail.

My new company uses IMAP. So now I can use Thunderbird for mail (news and RSS).

No more wasted time puzzling over why filter rules suddenly stop working.

No more wasted time messing around with proprietary PST files.

Fast, flexible, powerful search capability.

All my Outlook data imported seamlessly.

Small change, massive improvement.

payback time

I’d just like to say that my Palm Vx repaid me today for a small element of all the valuable time it has wasted in the past.

A recent change in circumstance meant some changes to my email environment.

Easy enough to resolve. Synchronise old environment with Palm. Switch into new environment. Reconfigure Outlook profile. Synchronise. Contacts, Tasks, Calendar and Notes all migrated seamlessly. Finished.

Well, I’d like to but I can’t.

heard it on the Newsvine

Yesterday, I stumbled across Newsvine which is a very impressive news aggregator. Until now, I didn’t much care for these type of sites. Digg left me a little cold with too many irrelevant, repeated articles (not to mention flame wars) and Slashdot hurt my eyes.

I currently use My Yahoo! with various news feeds configured and was starting to experiment with a similar, personalized Google portal with feeds from Google News as an alternative.

Newsvine is more focussed on news with feeds from Associated Press, tagging, watchlists, personalisation, discussions and your own news column (articles, links). The interface is well thought out, fast, easy to use and I quickly found myself exploring many different topics of interest.

Web based calendars

I have been thinking (yes I do a lot of that) recently about managing my personal calendar more effectively. Ideally, I would like a simple Web based calendar that could also sync to my Palm.

I don’t really like the Yahoo! Calendar that much even though it can sync with Outlook and the Palm. I simply don’t enjoy looking at the Yahoo! calendar. I just think the interface is ugly and there are distracting ads liberally scattered at the top of the screen.

finally succumbed

Tim Hall was right. I can resist everything except temptation.

Install Apache 1.3.2 for Windows. Very quick and easy. Slight feeling of version envy. The latest version is 2.x. Will upgrade later. Install mySQL 5.0 for Windows. Very quick and easy. Install mySQL Administration Tools 1.1. Very quick and easy. Install mySQL QueryBrowser 1.1.9. Very quick and easy.

Login to mySQL database. Create a table. Insert a record. Select the record. All seems fine.